Announcing Scotch Box 2.5

Today we're announcing a new release to Scotch Box. If you don't know what Scotch Box is, it's a prepackaged Vagrant box with a ton of LAMP stack features. It exists solely to make Vagrant dead-simple, remove overhead with setting up a PHP stack, and so you don't have to worry about Vagrant breaking all the time.

Scotch Box is a free thing we support and host for the dev community. It currently has 340,000+ downloads and is ranked #9 on the most downloaded Vagrant boxes of all time.

Node.js Updates

Even though these are packaged into the Vagrant box, we always recommend running node and any packages from your local machine and not within the box. This is strictly a performance thing. They only exist as helpers if you don't/can't set those up.

Installing Laravel

Below are instructions for installing Laravel in no time. Alternatively, you can download Laravel manually and just drag and drop. There's also a way to do this with Composer.

Use Older Versions of Scotch Box

If you hate this, we support older versions. You can set a version of Scotch Box in your Vagrantfile like so:

config.vm.box_version < 2.5

Update Policy and the Future of Scotch Box

We'll continue to support and update the box. It's important to note though that Vagrant is shifting their focus to the Otto Project. The Otto Project does basically what Scotch Box already does for you and gives you a dead-simple LAMP stack. It also has deployments. The problem is this is super-duper alpha. So as it progresses we'll update Scotch Box with details on when you too should make the switch.